Therapy can be a transformative and valuable experience helping you to break old patterns, achieve your goals and learn self-care. Whether you are seeking help for your mental health, physical complaints, or personal growth one thing you will typically be asked to do is to keep track of your complaints, symptoms or daily routine. In this blog we will look at why this simple, often underestimated exercise is so powerful and important for both you and your therapist, enhancing your therapeutic process. 

Self-awareness

Keeping track of your symptoms allows you to develop greater self awareness and a deeper understanding of yourself. By paying attention to your symptoms, thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, you can become more attuned to the patterns and triggers that influence your well-being. For example you may become more conscious of unhelpful thoughts that have an impact on your mood or specific behaviours you do and the negative consequences of this behaviour. Self-awareness is a crucial first step to make the changes we want to make in our lives. It will empower you to break free from autopilot and make conscious decisions about how you want to behave in various situations.

Identifying signals, triggers and patterns

Symptoms and complaints are often context specific. Specific emotions, symptoms or complaints may only occur in specific settings, with certain triggers or people. For example you may only feel anxious when in big groups or about heights. By keeping track of your complaints it can help both you and your therapist to uncover previously unnoticed triggers, signals and patterns that play a role in your complaints. This can play an important role in making effective changes in your therapy and the prevention of future complaints.

Optimising your treatment

Describing symptoms and remembering what exactly happened can sometimes be challenging. It’s not uncommon to forget or overlook important details when recalling symptoms or events during therapy sessions. By keeping track of your symptoms your therapist can use this information to get enhanced insight into the factors that play a role in your complaints and further personalise your treatment to your needs. Keeping a record of complaints will also help you and your therapist to objectively measure your progress during the treatment and evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions, making sure you are both on the right track.

Becoming your own therapist

As mentioned above, keeping track of your symptoms can help to get enhanced insight into your complaints and develop self-awareness. It will help you to identify activities, coping strategies, or lifestyle adjustments that alleviate symptoms, helping you to become your own therapist and make a plan to prevent future complaints.

Keeping track in NiceDay

Keeping track of your symptoms is an invaluable practice that can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your therapeutic journey. Using the NiceDay app you can easily keep track of your mood and various symptoms and complaints using our trackers and check-in feature. Using the check in feature on the homepage you can record your mood, give a reason and indicate what emotions you are experiencing. Using the trackers you can keep track of certain symptoms, signals, occurrences or complaints. The results of registrations are then made available for both you and your therapist to support your treatment process.

Fear. When you think of it, you might think of the fear you feel in dangerous situations such as walking along a cliff or when someone startles you. But fear can also occur at times when you are not in mortal danger at all. It can limit you in your daily life, make you feel sad or avoid you from going out. To better understand fear, it is important to understand what happens when you are feeling scared. I’d like to explain a bit more about that. 

Thinking patterns as a tool

Fear makes you alert in situations you perceive as dangerous and helps you prepare to react. Fear is accompanied by various physical reactions such as nausea, sweating, increased heart rate and muscle tension. But besides physical reactions, something also happens in your mind, automatic thinking patterns often emerge. These patterns are there to help you. For example, to flee faster or to avoid a problem, but also to be more focused or to pay attention. 

The other side 

However, when you go along with automatic patterns too often, your judgment can become clouded. Consider, for example, that you can never find out whether a dog is dangerous if you automatically run away. Or that you won’t learn your boss’s boundaries if you always say ‘yes’. In that case, thinking patterns can backfire:

1. Worst case scenario. When you feel scared, you assume the worst. This makes you cautious and so the outcome can only be better than expected. However, the probability of this disaster happening is not as high as it feels. Remember that there are other possibilities. 
2. Solvability. Fear can literally stiffen you and make you feel like something bad is happening to you. As a result, you forget or underestimate your ability to solve a problem. It is rare that there is nothing left to do when disaster actually happens. There is always something to fix or resolve!
3. Forbearance. Because you probably prefer to avoid unpleasant situations, you become used to ‘safety’ or comfort. As a result, you underestimate your ability to tolerate or endure disasters. It often feels very bad, but it is quite endurable when it comes down to it. Think back, for example, to the unpleasant things you have already been through in your life. You are still standing strong!
4. Responsibility. Stress activates our problem-solving ability to think about whether and how this could have been prevented. This also makes you reflect on your role in the situation and you may overestimate your responsibility. However, the fact that you could have done something differently does not mean that you should have done things differently. 

Do you recognise these thinking patterns when you feel scared? Or are you not yet aware of them? You might be able to pay attention to this the next time you feel scared and find out what thinking patterns are at play with you.

The feeling that you mean something and that you’re worthy determines your daily functioning and how you feel. Self-esteem is the image you have of yourself on an emotional level, without logical reasoning. It is entirely yours and has nothing to do with how you come across towards others, or what others think of you. For example, someone may appear very confident but actually has little self-esteem. What about your self-esteem? What grade do you give yourself?

Developing your self-esteem

You can derive your self-worth from many things outside of yourself. Think about your appearance, possessions, achievements, and relationships. What you derive your value from therefore also partly determines on which you base your choices. Often we are very busy maintaining these things, but that withholds us from living free. In the long run, this is a recipe for mental distress and ultimately an unhappy existence.

Is it possible to improve your self-esteem?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have more self-esteem? That you dare to make decisions that change your life for the better. This gives you the opportunity to find the job that suits you better. Spend your time with friends who give you energy, instead of drain it. To experience comfort in people who are there for you when you are sad. The steps below will help you on your way to improved self-esteem!

• Find the source

The image you have of yourself has developed during the course of your life. Is your lack of self-esteem related to the lack of recognition you received from your parents? Perhaps you have been bullied in the past and therefore feel that you are less worthy? List your thoughts and feelings about it. Use the diary in the NiceDay app, or do this together with a healthcare professional.

• Observe your own (judgmental) thoughts

Often it is your own thoughts from which you derive your self-esteem. Stop being so hard on yourself! Get started with Thought Records in the NiceDay app to organize your thoughts.

• Self-acceptance

Sometimes putting things into perspective isn’t enough to make you feel better. When you accept yourself as a whole, you give yourself the space to find the power that resides within you. Take a friendly look at where you are in life right now. Let everything be there, even those parts and emotions that you would rather not see or experience. Once we start excluding parts, they can’t let go of us. Be open and willing to behold everything, without denial, without avoidance, without judgment or criticism.

• Here and now

Many people think too much about the past or the future. The challenge is to be in the here and now. Regularly take the time to sit with yourself in silence. Is meditation a step too far, take a walk in nature! Go to the forest or the beach, breathe in the fresh air and take a conscious look around you.

• Discover your own core values

What is important to you? Self-esteem is also about your own core values. You will improve your self-esteem if you know what your core values are and if you start consciously choosing those core values. If you know who you are and what you stand for, it’s easier to work towards something. This will increase your feeling of self-worth. 

• Exercise!

Sport contributes to a healthy lifestyle; you feel more comfortable in your own skin as a result. You will not only feel this boost in your body but also in your thoughts and feelings. Body and mind are connected!

• Take responsibility

Stop blaming others for the situation you are in right now. Where possible, choose to take action yourself. You can decide to no longer allow unhealthy forms of dependence and victimization. Not the other person, but YOU are ultimately responsible for your own happiness in life!

Help

Is your lack of self-esteem getting in the way of your daily life, and would you like to talk to someone about it? Make an appointment with your doctor, or click here for more information about NiceDay treatment at various mental healthcare institutions.

An online treatment via NiceDay; what does that actually look like? Can you build a good relationship with your therapist? What is so nice about the app and how does contact in between sessions really work? Rosa (22) sought help for an accumulation of problems in her life. How did Rosa experience online help? Read her experience story here.

No long waiting list

“I was talking to a friend and told her that I was looking for help, but didn’t want to wait such a long time. There had been an accumulation of problems in recent years, but especially the abuse by my ex-boyfriend came to the surface again. My friend told me that her sister had sought help through NiceDay and that you could get started right away. ”

Doubt

“When I heard about the online treatment, I had some doubts. What will that be like? Is it just as personal as a face to face session? But, I put my doubts aside and after two minutes I had installed the app on my phone and sent a message to the NiceDay Team. I received an immediate response and we scheduled an intake interview for less than a week later. I really liked that. The process went very quickly and I did not have to wait long for a response. ”

It saves so much time if I can register my experiences and feelings in the app during the week, and my practitioner has already read them when we have another session.

Relationship practitioner

“After my intake interview, I was quickly linked to NiceDay professional Sarah. As I mentioned I had some doubts about the online treatment, but those were immediately taken away during our first session. I felt good and comfortable. The afternoons after our conversations I often noticed that I was much more productive and active! I immediately felt more like doing things. Sarah often sent me helpful articles that I could read to become more active. This also kept me working on my recovery between our sessions. ”

Previous treatment vs NiceDay

“I think it is a great advantage of a treatment through NiceDay that I don’t have to repeat my story over and over again. I have previously been in treatment where I had less contact in between sessions. Of course you can send your practitioner an email when things aren’t going well, but you can’t do this every day. I also had to repeat everything during the session. It saves so much time if I can register my experiences and feelings in the app during the week, and my practitioner has already read them when we have another session.” 

NiceDay

“Thanks to this treatment, I have gained more insight into how I am doing and what I can do about it. It has helped me to communicate better with my current partner. Plus, I have received enough tools to be able to continue working on this in the future! ”

“I would therefore definitely recommend a treatment through NiceDay. The biggest reasons for this are being able to start treatment quickly and the contact in between sessions. During your journey, there is one person for you who you can always chat with when things really go wrong. This makes this treatment, despite being online, a lot more personal.”

Rosa received online help through the NiceDay app. Would you like to know more about NiceDay or about how you can start treatment? You can find more information about this here or directly download the NiceDay app.